Fallen Angels (12 page)

He smiled. 'And glad that my mother didn't?'

'She would have been welcome.'

He laughed. 'I like your Lord Culloden.'

'He's not mine.'

Mrs Hutchinson was laying out a dress of white crepe with Brussels lace at the neck and cuffs. Uncle Achilles looked at it where it lay on her bed and smiled. 'A wedding dress?'

'Go away.'

'But I do like him, truly!' Uncle Achilles took a pinch of snuff, crossed to her dressing table, and sat down. He opened a pot of rouge, dabbed a finger in it, and rubbed it experimentally on the back of his hand. 'Not my colour.'

She crossed her arms. 'I'm going to be late, uncle.'

It was only four o'clock in the afternoon, yet already Campion had ordered candles lit in her bedroom. It was gloomy outside, the sky grey and darkening over the Lazen valley. Uncle Achilles twisted on his chair and stared down at the townspeople who walked in excited groups towards the Castle's entrance. 'You English make a great fuss about Christmas.'

'We don't make any fuss at all. We simply have a good time. Those of us, that is, who are allowed to dress.'

He grinned at her. He was clothed, Campion thought, lasciviously; there was no other word. He had a suit of gold cloth, a new wig with silk tails, gold-buckled shoes of satin, stockings of white silk, and the faintest touch of cosmetics on his face. He saw her looking him up and down. His voice was teasingly anxious. 'You think I'm presentable?'

'You look wonderful. Just like a bishop.'

He laughed. He dipped her powder puff into the china bowl and brushed it against his hand. He held the hand out to the window and frowned critically. His nails were varnished. 'In London they think I'm very elegant. But then I'm French which always impresses the English. They feel inferior to us for one very good reason.'

'Because they are?' She smiled. She thought how bored Achilles must be; an elegant, clever Frenchman only half employed in a strange country. He smiled at her.

'Exactly, dear niece. You are so sensible for a mere woman.' He crossed his legs, taking care not to crease his silk stockings. 'The English have a sneaking suspicion that we know something about life and elegance and beauty that they do not know, and it is every Frenchman's duty to continue the illusion. It is even, dear niece, the duty of someone like yourself who has the blessing of being half French.' He smiled seraphically. 'Has he asked you to marry yet?'

'I haven't known him five weeks yet!'

'How proper you are, dear niece.' He smiled and turned to the dressing table again. He dipped his finger into the cochineal ointment she would use on her lips and painted a heart on her mirror. He ignored her protests. He pierced the heart with an arrow. Above its fletches he wrote 'CL', by its point he wrote 'LC. He inspected his work. 'There's a certain symmetry to the two of you.'

Mrs Hutchinson, who had not understood a word of the French they had been speaking, understood the drawing. She laughed.

Campion, who was dressed only in a full length bed robe of coloured Peking silk, sat on the chaise longue. She smiled at her uncle. 'You think the symmetry is important?'

'I think it's wonderful!' He was fastidiously wiping his finger on one of her towels. 'After all, lovers always seek fate's happy signs. One says "I was born on a Monday" and the other says "and I also!", and from that mere, unimportant coincidence they deduce that heaven has had a hand in their conjunction.' He shrugged. 'I think CL and LC come into that happy, heavenly category, don't you?'

'You want me to marry him?'

He smiled wickedly. He liked teasing her, not the least because she never took offence, however shocked she might be by his words. 'Do you wish to marry him, dear Campion?'

'What I wish, uncle, is to get dressed.'

He stood, bowed, and smiled again. 'I retire defeated from the field. You will dance with me?'

'Of course.'

'If Lord Culloden will let you. Do you think he's the jealous kind? Men with moustaches often are.'

'Go away.'

He did, crossing in the doorway with Edna, Campion's maid, who had fetched a bowl of warm water and hot towels.

It was Christmas Eve, the traditional day of celebration, the day when the town came to the Castle and the Castle provided bowls of frumenty and plates of pies and vats of punch and music from the gallery and fires in the great hearths and hogsheads of ale and puddings that had seeped their smell from one end of the huge building to the other and, as midnight drew near, great platters of roasted geese would bring cheers from the throng in the Great Hall.

A throng which expected the Lady Campion to marry. The word seemed to haunt the Castle. The rumour was like a whisper in every room, in every corridor, in every smiling face that greeted her. Lord Culloden had been in Lazen just a few weeks, yet all the Castle, all the estate, expected there would be a marriage.

Lord Culloden had said nothing. He was correct, polite, and charming, yet the mere fact of his presence fed the rumour that, before the leaves fell again, the Lady Campion would be wed.

She dressed with more care than usual.

Mrs Hutchinson cooed over her, patting the dress where it did not need adjusting, twitching hair that was like pale, shining gold. 'You look a picture!'

'I feel exhausted, Mary.' Campion, as usual, had organized the day's celebration.

Mrs Hutchinson smiled. 'You look lovely, dear, quite lovely.' What she meant, Campion knew, was that she looked lovely for him.

For whom, though?

For the Gypsy was also here.

She had seen him and the sight of him after so long was like an arrow thrust into the heart. She had thought she had forgotten him, she thought that the memory of that slim, dark, oddly blue-eyed face was just that, a memory. She had persuaded herself that her thoughts about the Gypsy were not about a real man, but about an idealized man, about a dream, and then she had seen his smiling, strong, competent face, and it seemed as if her heart stopped for that moment, there had been a surge of inexplicable, magic joy, and then she had turned abruptly away.

He had brought a letter from Toby. Toby was still in France, working for his mysterious master, Lord Paunceley. The letter asked her forgiveness that he could not be in Lazen this Christmas. Instead the Gypsy was in Lazen and on this night of Christmas Eve, just as at the old Roman feast of Saturnalia from which Christmas had sprung, the servants in Lazen would join the festivities with those they served. Tonight the Gypsy was her equal.

The blue ribbons were threaded into her sleeve so that, when she danced, they would hang and swirl.

About her neck were sapphires.

In her hair were pearls.

She stared at herself in the mirror. CL and LC.

Lord Culloden had come into her life in a blaze of heroism, in a manner of a Galahad or a Lancelot. He was tall, he was eager to please, and he was happy to make her happy.

She could not think of a single thing that she disliked about Lord Culloden, unless it was a slightly supercilious air towards his inferiors. She guessed the superciliousness came from his family's lack of money, a fear that with a little more bad luck he would become like those he despised. On the other hand, as he became more comfortable with Lazen's great wealth and privilege, he was displaying a dry and sometimes elegant wit. She smeared the red arrow with her finger and she thought that CL did not dislike LC. She might even like him very much, but there was the uncomfortable fact that when she saw him about the Castle she felt nothing. Or, at least, she did not feel the delicious, secret thrill that the Gypsy gave her.

She wished the Gypsy had not come. She stood. She stared for a moment at the grey, lowering clouds beyond her window. The hills across the valley looked cold, their crests twisting like agony to the winter sky. At the top of Two Gallows Hill, like a black sack, hung the man who had attacked her.

She shuddered, closed the curtains, and turned. Tonight there would be music and dancing, the sound of laughter in the Great Hall and flamelight on its panelling. Yet none of that, she knew, gave her the tremulous, lovely, guilty anticipation that sparkled in her eyes as she left the room. She had dressed with care, she had made herself beautiful, and, though she could not even admit it to herself, she had not done it for Lord Culloden. She walked towards the music.

There was applause as she walked down the stairs, applause that grew louder as more people at the edges of the room turned to watch her. The compliment made her smile shyly.

'I hope you know how lucky you are, my Lord,' Achilles d'Auxigny said to Lord Culloden.

Lord Culloden smiled. His eyes were fixed on Campion. 'Give her wings and she would be an angel.'

Achilles raised his plucked eyebrows. 'The church fathers maintained that angels did not procreate, or how would you English say? They don't roger?'

A look of utter shock passed over Lord Culloden's face, as if what a man might say in the regimental Mess of the Blues was one thing, but quite another to hear it said of a girl like Campion. He smiled frostily at Achilles, then walked forward with his arm held out. 'My dear lady?' He bowed.

'My Lord.'

And the sight of the two together, the one in white crepe and blue ribbons, sparkling with precious stones, and the other in gleaming uniform, served only to make the applause louder. The sound reached the Earl of Lazen, whose room Campion had just left, and he smiled proudly at the Reverend Horne Mounter. 'Pretty filly, Mounter, eh?'

'Undoubtedly, my Lord. I suppose she'll be married soon?'

'That's up to her, Mounter, up to her.' The Earl's tone made it quite plain that he was not going to discuss his daughter's marriage plans with the rector. 'I'll oblige you for another glass.'

The Reverend Horne Mounter, who doubted whether the Earl should be drinking frumenty at all, reluctantly poured the glass and put it at the bedside. He took a volume of sermons from his tail pocket. 'Can I read to you, my Lord?'

The Earl seemed to shudder. 'Save your voice for the morning, Mounter.' He drank the frumenty in one draught, sighed, then smiled as the liquid warmed his belly. 'Put the jug by me, then go and enjoy yourself, Mounter. Parsons should enjoy themselves at Christmas! Your lady wife has come?'

'Indeed, my Lord.' The rector smiled eagerly. 'I'm sure she would be most happy to greet your Lordship.'

'Not up to parsons' wives tonight, Mounter. Give her my best respects.' He clumsily poured another glass. 'Go on with you, man!'

Few at the Castle would be drunk so quickly as the Lord of Lazen, but few had such good reason. All had good means. The frumenty was a speciality of Lazen, brewed for days in the great vats at the brewhouse. Despite the bad harvest the Castle had kept sacks of wheat aside that had been husked, then boiled in milk. When the mash was thick it was mixed with sugar, allowed to cool from the boiling point, and then liberally laced with rum. The recipe claimed that enough rum should be added to make a man drunk with the fumes, at which point the amount of rum should be doubled. The frumenty was cooled. At the last moment, before serving, it was heated again, mixed with egg yolks, and brought to the hall before it could boil. It was drunk only on Christmas Eve, it was too strong for any other day. The Reverend Horne Mounter, who allowed himself some sips of the Castle sherry on this night, secretly believed that the frumenty was a fermentation of the devil, but to say so was to risk the Earl's displeasure.

In the Great Hall Lord Culloden watched in amazement as the liquid was served. He had taken a cup himself and drunk it slowly, but the tenants and townspeople were drinking it like water. He smiled at Campion. 'How long do they stand up?'

'Long enough. They deserve it.' She smiled up at him. 'You're not bored?'

'Good Lord, no! Why should I be bored?'

'It's hardly London, my Lord.'

He looked at the noisy, shouting, drinking throng. 'I always enjoy birthdays.' He laughed.

The local gentry had come, and Campion saw how they kept themselves at one end of the hall while the common folk kept to the other. She walked through both ends, greeting old friends and neighbours, introducing the tall, golden haired cavalry Major at her side. Already, she thought, we behave as though we were married. She looked constantly for a tall, black haired figure, but the Gypsy could not be seen.

The dances were hardly the dances of London. They were country dances that all the guests knew, dances as old as Lazen itself. The Whirligig was followed by Hit and Miss and then Lady Lie Near Me. The church orchestra played fast and merrily and the dancers slowly mixed the two ends of the hall together. Once in a while, in a gesture towards the gentry, Simon Stepper, the bookseller and flautist of the church orchestra, would order his players to provide a minuet.

There was applause again when Campion and Lord Culloden danced to one such tune. The floor seemed to clear for them.

He danced well, better than she would have expected. He smiled at her. 'Your father spoke to me today.'

'He did, my Lord?' The room turned about her in a blur of happy faces, candles, and firelight on old panelling. Lord Culloden made the formal, slow gestures with elegance. The month's easy living in Lazen, she saw, had thickened his neckline so that the flesh bulged slightly at his tight, gold-encrusted collar. He smiled.

'He wanted my advice.'

Campion smiled at Sir George Perrott who, bless him, had led Mrs Hutchinson onto the floor. For that, she thought, she would give Sir George a kiss under the mistletoe. She could not see the Gypsy. 'About what, my Lord?'

'Your cousin.'

'Oh Lord!' Campion said rudely. She smiled at the miller who, with pretensions to gentility, had insisted on dancing this minuet with his wife and had bumped heavily into Campion's back. 'About Julius? What about him?'

Lord Culloden frowned as the tempo of the orchestra underwent a frumenty-induced change. He adjusted his steps. 'It seems he has written asking for money.' He had to speak loudly to be heard over the riot of conversation and laughter from the lower end of the hall. 'He's in bad debt!'